The volume of data flowing from orbiting sensors has
increased dramatically in the past few years, and even more
data will be received in the near future with the launch of
NASA's
Earth Observing System satellites. Datasets have increased
in size from megabytes to terabytes. Data volumes of this
magnitude are difficult to manage, especially when it comes
to online access. It is just not practical to download a billion
bytes of data representing measurements from multiple sensors
over the whole world for a week when all that is needed is
a even one orbit.

Subsetting provides the data consumer with the
capability to reduce the size and complexity of the data ordered.
This saves disk space on the user's system and greatly reduces
the time required to download and process the data. The Science
Data Subsetting Center has been established by the
Information Technology and Systems Center (ITSC) at the
University
of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) in conjunction with NASA.
The center provides a variety of subsetting tools to meet
your data processing needs.